James Davis Nicoll

Age of Ambition Bundle Adventurer! This all-new Age of Ambition Bundle presents Age of Ambition, the tabletop fantasy roleplaying game from Tab Creations. The moon called Trystell, home to many magical peoples, is rapidly m...

Bundle of Holding: Age of Ambition

The corebook and 19 supplements for Tab Creation's tabletop fantasy roleplaying game Age of Ambition.

bundleofholding.com/presents/Amb...

I wasn't a fussy eater except in the sense of disliking food that consumed more calories to chew than it would deliver, while sucking every bit of moisture out of my body.

"Roy Lichtenstein, to the white courtesy phone."

Some places, that diagnosis is a bar to organ transplant eligibility, and to immigration. I bet if you waterboarded a Canadian doctor, they'd freely admit it makes more likely the doctor will considerately provide an unrequested DNR or suggest MAID for a head-cold.

He revealed that he'd never mentioned it because he assumed I'd been diagnosed as somewhere on the spectrum decades ago. Rude.

I balked at the $1200 bill. Then it occurred to me to check what the legal consequences of a diagnosis would be. Ha ha I keep forgetting people are evil bastards. (con't)

The test price came in the context of non-diagnostic tests I took where scores of 6/10 or above suggested some degree of autism, and that one might want to mention it to one's doctor. I consistently got 9.

Also, they would gain unambiguous appellations. No more confusion if "American" references both continents, the nation between Canada and Mexico, or just the real, net-tax-paying states. They could be Californians, or Texans, or Washingtonians. OK, the last one needs a little work.

Something US states should consider: as sovereign nations, they could make a case they're not on the hook for the US national debt.

It didn't matter how long you chewed the turkey or how much milk you drank with it. It never became palatable or easily swallowed.

However, if I started with the worst food, I could eat my way towards the stuff I liked.

We were expected to finish all of the food on our plates and until my parents noped out of cooking entirely, we didn't get much choice about what went onto those plates. Some of our standard meals were pretty good. The turkey and pork tended to be the stuff of nightmares. (con't)

OCD or ADHD. At my age, I won't be. Ontario assumes people my age either have all the coping mechanisms they need or cannot acquire them. Either way, there's no funding and I have better uses for $1200.

However, I am pretty sure the food thing is because my parents were born in the 1930s. (con't)

I liked my SF over here and my fantasy over there, just like I preferred my food to be organized by type and eaten in reverse order of preference, and just like if I have M&Ms, I sort them by colour and consume them so as to end with one of each by the end.

I've never been tested for (con't)

What a silly idea, thought I, only to get hooked on RPGs thanks to Traveller a year and two months later.

The game was part of a 1979 article titled On Evenings Beyond the Fields We Know, which explained the concept of roleplaying games or as Ford for some reason called them, ​“rôle-playing games”. Starquest wasn't a complete game. It was also a science fantasy game, which I considered an abomination.

Like all good people, the game that hooked me on TTRPGS was Traveller. Who wouldn't want to play a middle-aged person making bad decisions out of economic desperation. However, it was not my into to TTRPGs. Neither was (ugh) AD&D. My intro to the idea of rpgs was John M. Ford's Starquest.

Acceptable methods include genealogical records, knowing the significance of "half an hour later in Newfoundland", knowing who Ernie Coombs was, and knowing what comes after "How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now."

Sorry, half way across University Avenue, which is a busy road.

Also, don't ask me how to secure the doors so nobody can exit during the show or you will get my canned lecture involved the Iroquois Theatre fire, the Cocoanut Grove fire, the Station nightclub fire, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, & phases like "mass casualty event", and "burned beyond recognition."

Do not heroically power through norovirus to attend events or you too will become a central figure in folklore.

I wished my successor all the best and left by a different door.

Wait, no. There was a third event involving that door. That was the door where, literally seconds after I dropped the HM keys into the next HM's hand, a dancer who had heroically powered through her norovirus infection, began projectile vomiting.

No, no. Every time I get on the thing, I am disappointed by the lack of actual ion drives.

Waterloo Region has a light rail system called the Ion that very disappointingly uses neither ions or hard-light-based rails. The trains are the size of whales, travel along predictable paths at predictable times, and are to KW drivers as irresistible as flames to moths.

The other time, there was a client with a very shaky grasp of basic safety and one of the four fire code violations I noticed in the first ten seconds after I entered the building was a table moved to block that door, which they had taped shut.

(All of those got addressed immediately)

The door on the far right leaving Hagey is a powered door. Once, the door-opening doohickey detached from the wall and then swung from the lever thingies through the open door at face height. Luckily, there were no faces in the volume it passed through. It would have done serious damage.

(con't)

Not little stuff like doors 1 and 3 relocking themselves or doors 5 and 6 not latching if it's humid. Stuff like large parts of door just detaching.

Usually, this doesn't stop the door from door but I had two that did. Same door both times, totally different causes.

(con't)

As I understood it, some vital bit of vital ancillary train-related infrastructure fell off the thing it was supposed to be attached to and then stopped working for some reason.

One of the records I have at work is "most number of significant door anomies" (con't)

Enormous luck with yesterday's Ion disruption: not only did it not prevent me from getting to work on time, but the train that became stationary did so on UW land, not half-way across University.

Inexplicably, the issue wasn't someone driving into the train.

In the end, we had our heads handed to us in the first two encounters, settled for recovering one of the three items we were looking for, and our Halfing is now a werewolf.

(The barbarian convinced him not to get cured but to embrace periodic homicidal frenzy as a strength)

There was very evidence we were rolling d20s to hit, as opposed to d10s or d6s or in the case of one player, a one-sider.